The race to stop Iran getting the bomb is what counts

Kevyn Bodman

How do we know that the election was rigged?
How do we know that it is not just a case of city dwellers, in areas where it is easy to assemble and get coverage,taking to the streets because they didn't like a legitimate result?
How do we know that it wasn't simply a case of rural millions out-voting city voters?

Why are you ready to celebrate demonstrations against an election result that the demonstrators don't like?

I don't know what the legitimate vote totals were. I do know that you have not been able to show that the legitimate number of votes cast is different from the official totals.

I think you should set about doing that first.

And I caution you against thinking that the opposition are democrats whose policies would fit into the mainstream of Western political thought.

Augustus

Now that President Obama has embarked on a sort of crusade against Israel, it's probably no bad thing that Ahmadinejad has won the Iranian election. Mousavi may have been more of a threat to Israel? One can imagine him having intimate dinners with Obama in the White House, with talk of the Zionist threat and the need for a nuclear deterrent. Ahmadinejad is the darling of the Mullahs. Mousavi was just a puppet to show the West how 'democratic'
Iran is. Now we know how the Islamic world treats elections.
War with Iran is now just a matter of 'when', not 'if'. Let's hope that when it comes Israel gets Obama's support.

Jane G

So the Bush doctrine was right after all - only you haven't the guts to put it like that, James.

Maybe Cheney should run in 2012. The free world is going to need someone like him to stop the rot.

Oz Roy

The Iranian election mess, like its murky Mullocracy politics, is an egg than cannot be unscrambled. According to noted Iran observer Bob Baer, we are unlikely to ever know the full extent of the vote rigging or whether or not Mousavi won most of the vote (unlikely)but more importantly, we should not forget that ALL of the candidates were approved by the Islamic Ruling Council BEFORE being allowed to contest the elections.

Mousavi may be more democractically acceptable but again it should be remembered he set up Iranian intelligence and has his own connections in the Islamic security/intelligence system.

Not a 'democrat' as we in the West would know then!

Iran is and will continue to be governed by an Islamic - not secular - government, elections notwithstanding. The Mullahs have it stitched up. This in turn means that whoever wins the election will not put a halt on their ambitions to produce the Shiite version of the bomb.

Perhaps even more disturbing is Obama's belated and virtually mute response to yet another example of democracy being trampled on.

elfraed

"Obama and others should make it clear that the problem is not with Iran having the bomb but this Iranian regime having one."
The West has come to realize that changing Iran's course is not possible short of conquering the country. Nor is anybody about to create a state of war by attacking an Iran on the threshold of nuclear weaponization. Worst case scenario: Israel will continue to be a hostage, but to an increasing numbers of nuclear armed countries until such time as the Islamists feel it is safe to eliminate her as though it were an inevitability of history.

Farhad Nadjm

So it seems that one million people on the streets - ONE MILLION - cuts no ice with the asinine fool writing this article, nor with Spectator readers.

I truly can not believe the idiotic comments below - I am not even going to make an effort to provide the counter argument.

I will only say three things:

1. Do not talk about things about which you know nothing whatsoever. Thanks for your support for democracy - even if Mousavi is still part of the establishment you can't, in your ignorance, be blamed for not appreciating how much better he is than Ahmadinejad. If he got in, the even more dangerous nutter Khamenei would also fall.

2. Look closer to home. The establishment has conned you (and me) into wasting taxpayers money on pornography, moats, and expensive TVs, and they are still there. They have published highly edited accounts of their expenses now. Look to yourselves, oh weak willed people of Britain. You have put up with a lot, and you just roll over and say "hit me again". The people of Iran are an example to you, facing police and bullets for their beliefs. You should be ashamed of your own pathetic inaction.

3. I am cancelling my subscription, because I do not want to be in the same room as such loud mouths ignorami.

Sharon

Surely the main lesson over the last week is that it is more urgent than ever before to eradicate the possibility of Iran having nuclear weapons regardless of which way such action might sway the people of Iran! For if Iran’s drive for nuclear arms is stifled at least for several decades whilst they sort out their allegiances, the people of Iran can go back into the darkness of the Ayatollah led regime – that is their choice not ours. Our choice must be to ensure that the wars between the different sects of Islam do not overspill into democratic countries and that the major war of Islamic imperialism is apprehended forthwith. If we wait to eradicate the nuclear facility until after a decision is made in this current Iranian political impasse and if the ultimate conclusion in the next few weeks is a change to Mousavi, then it will be almost but impossible for the West to take care of that nuclear programme. It must be done and it must be done now or forever lose the opportunity to rebalance the world away from tyrannical Islam.

Gautam

Farhad Nadjm

I have some sense of what you are saying. In these spaces I have in the past argued for west's support to the opponents of Ahmedinejad inside Iran. To my mind that has been the only approach worth taking. Under no circumstances must the US attack Iran; that would be the gravest folly. Instead, America must call for major democracies to join in condemning the theocracy in Iran. Such a league of democracies must actively support the civil society's revolution in Iran. This is what the brave and sensitive people of Iran need and deserve.

As for Mr Forsyth's article, it does help in further developing perspectives.

Jon Livesey

I am quite prepared to believe that the Iran elections were rigged, or that they were not. I don't think we know nearly enough about the internals of Iran to say. And who are the demonstrators in Tehran? Are they a representative sample, or just the capital's middle class?

There are two very deep errors we westerners make about the rest of the world, and this article exemplifies both of them.

The first error is to assume that the overthrow of an authoritarian regime ushers in moderation. Does it really? Did the overthrow of the Tsar lead to a moderate regime? Well, for about nine months it did. How about the overthrow of the Kaiser, the Emperor of Abyssinia, the King of Iraq, the Shah, Chiang Kai Shek, or any Pakistani government-of-the-month?

In reality, overthrows lead to the will of the people being more directly expressed, and there is no guarantee that a people, especially a poor and downtrodden people will immediately opt for moderation. Once they take their revenge on the overthrown, they go right back to business as usual.

The second error we make is to assume that because a problem is "what counts" we are able to do something about it. The Iranian people have been sold nuclear weapons as a key to their future as a regional power. That does not change if you hang a few Mullahs from lamp-posts. No Iranian regime whatsoever is going to willingly offer up its nuclear program to the West on a plate. They'd give up Islam first.

The non-proliferation genie is out of the bottle, and since nuclear technology cannot be un-invented, nuclear weapons will continue to spread. MAD was the bipolar strategy for keeping the peace between NATO and Warsaw. Soon, massive retaliation will become a multi-polar strategy between the West on one side - including Russia - and the less developed world on the other.

Ironically, it is globalization and increasing wealth that has driven this, because in the end the only countries to which you can deny nuclear weapons are those which depend on aid for survival. Any country that can pay its own bills can have nuclear weapons. It just takes time.

Augustus

You make a good point about the new US administration's lack of effort. If it had no desire to give Ahmadinejad a boost before polling day it shouldn't have been so accomodating in its unbridled acceptance of the ruling elite. Even prior to being elected president, one of Obama's campaign promises was that he was going to sit down with Ahmadinejad and negotiate. But then, and before the election, it was the US that had the pre-conditions, now, and with the re-elected Iranian president's enhanced power and official recognition, it is the dictatorial regime which can impose them. Once the 'shock' of the paper tiger revolution has worn off, America will side with the now strengthened dictatorial regime instead of anyone more representative of the people, and be told in no uncertain fashion that all those
Iranian opposition activists who have fled Iran are criminals and must be sent back; all frozen assets must be released; Hamas and Hezbollah must be recognized as government representatives; and all US-initiated UN Security Council resolutions on Iran must be suspended. Plenty of 'musts' and probably not a squeak of protest from Obama.

dcandersson

bad article.

(I apologize for the descent into the inelegant expedient of bullet points)

* it is utter lunacy, whipped up by a combination of Western self-righteousness and the pro-Israel interests, to imagine that Iran will give up nuclear ambitions.

*it is equally silly to imagine that Iran, however much we dislike its internal politics, would ever use these weapons, as long as anything like the Guardian Council rules. Axis of evil? One can imagine Saddam having used a nuclear weapon to wipe out the Kurds perhaps, and Korea wouldn't do anything without China saying yes first, which means 'no', but Iran just isn't a rogue state. It may 'sponsor terrorism' (well, ok, it does) but there comes a point when realpolitik meets moral authority, and we now don't have it, quite apart from the fact that our last major involvement with Iranian internal affairs was installing a Shah against the will of the people in 1953: that wasn't terrrorism because we just did it by more open means. Morally just as bad.

*Iran is a country that likes revolutions, and this fact should temper any idea of the groundswell toward Western democracy.

David L Nilsson

More channelling of alarmist neocon rubbish from what used to be a thoughtful, independent-minded British journal.

I wish all these water carriers for Israel would just make aliyah and leave us in peace. Iran's internal politics are nobody's business but Iran's, and all this cant about freedom and democracy sounds feebler than ever as our own system is exposed as rotten to the core.

For the last time, you propagandists-- sixteen US intelligence agencies have determined "with high confidence" that Iran, one of the least internationally aggressive countries on earth for centuries, has NOT been seeking nuclear weapons for at least six years. The IAEA can't find them, the mullahs don't want them and Big Bogeyman Ahmadinejad (surely the feeblest sheeple-scarer ever) has no say in the matter.

Meanwhile Israel-- an increasingly and overtly racist rogue state-- colonizes, defies its American paymaster, persecutes Palestnnians and lies its head off about its vast armoury of nukes. "Conservative" papers try to whip up hatred against Iran.

Spare us the insults to OUR intelligence, even if you refuse to acknowledge America's military intelligence! Or do you want to drag us into yet another idiot war at the USA's heels?

Tony Gee

It is an academic discussion because Israel will strike before Iran reaches nuclear capability with the USA complicit or not. In the final analysis America will always back Israel, who will ultimately determine the policy.